A mailing job defines the various rules, requirements and constraints associated with the processing of a plurality of mail items, the owners of said mail items and the human and machine resources necessary to process the mail items within a given mail processing environment. When the mail processing environment is a presort bureau or other sort processing facility, it is common to employ one or more sorters to facilitate execution of the mailing job. This is especially true in cases where the mailing job features large volumes of mail items requiring sorting in accord with postal authority rules or the like. Sort schemes are executable instructions operable by the one or more sorters that define how they are to respond to a mail item (e.g. mark it or sort it) during processing of a mailing job, such as with respect to particular postal authority rules. In concert with the sort schemes, a pallet scheme defines how and where mail trays containing a group of commonly sorted mail items of a mailing job are to be staged and loaded onto pallets for shipment to the postal authority.
Maintenance of sort schemes and pallet schemes is of utmost importance for ensuring that a mailing job is processed in accord with the latest and greatest postal regulations. Failure to do so results in improperly sorted or palletized mail items, which in the case of the United States Postal Authority, creates numerous mail fines. Typically, pallet scheme maintenance is driven by a customer service agreement between the mailer of a mailing job (or agent thereof) and the postal authority. The agreement defines, amongst other things, the designated pickup times and locations within the sort processing facility of pallets containing mail trays having specific zip schemes. A pallet scheme maintenance tool is typically used within the sort processing facility for processing mail trays in accord with the agreement. Sort scheme maintenance, on the other hand, may be driven by adaptations to zip code designations per the postal authority or by internal mailing criteria changes ,such as changes to mailing job parameters. If a pallet scheme is created or changed independently from its associated sort scheme or vice versa, incompatibility between the schemes can cause operation delay or may necessitate a re-run of the mail processing job, which is even worse.
Today's sort scheme or pallet scheme maintenance tools require manual association or linking of a particular sort scheme and/or pallet scheme at the time of edition or creation. So, for example, when selecting one or more sort schemes to run for processing a particular mailing job on one or more sorters, a pallet scheme for indicating where the schemed mail trays are to be physically located and loaded onto pallets for pickup must also be manually selected at this time. Of course, when changes to the pallet scheme per postal authority rules occur, a tedious process of reassigning the pallet location designations respective to the sort schemes must be undertaken. This results in the sorter operator manually adapting every sort bin assignment within a sort scheme (there may be several sort schemes) relative to the pallet scheme change.
Hence, a need exists for improved sort scheme and pallet scheme maintenance procedures that enable dynamic association and updating of schemes relative to postal authority rule changes, for example, on an automated basis.